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Snapshot Design

Snapshot Design - Where to Begin?

There are many ways to build a nice-looking Performance Snapshot to show off your hard work in collecting and analyzing your performance data. Choose the solution that best fits your needs and your capacity to keep your snapshot up to date. You will notice in the gallery and examples that snapshots are designed in different formats.

Microsoft Office tools are in wide use and it can be quite useful to build your snapshot in MS Word, Excel or Powerpoint. This is pretty useful to since you can easily connect your data with source files, and most people in your organization will be able to access and update the Snapshot.

There are also data visualization tools out there, including many solutions that are used in the corporate world. In experimenting with a few different ones, we have found that SAP's Crystal Presentation Design and Dashboard Design software provides useful features that build on Excel spreadsheets and do some pretty cool things with data visualization. It also creates the dashboard in a Flash format that is very easy to integrate on websites, as well as directly into presentations and documents. Another plus is that registered nonprofits are eligible to get the Dashboard Design software at a fraction of the standard license cost through Techsoup.

There are also many new software applications on-line that can help to build infographics, some which even offer interactivity. For more information see this blog on the topic.